


Spider-Void

by Haberdasher



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Agender Character, Animal Death, Autistic Character, Child Death, Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Gun Violence, Loss of Parent(s), Major Original Character(s), Murder-Suicide, Nonbinary Character, Original Character(s), POV Original Character, Parent Death, Parent-Child Relationship, Shooting, Spiders, Spidersona, Suicide, Superpowers, Trans, Trans Character, Transformation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-07 01:13:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17356166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: Okay, let's do this one last time: My name is Adrian Ragno, and I was bitten by a radioactive spider...(Or, a series of blurbs about my spidersona.)





	1. A Beginning

Part of Adrian wished that there was a more interesting story behind their spider bite.

They weren’t in the middle of some grand adventure when they got bitten, or on some journey for the ages. They weren’t making something of themself, or doing something with themself. They weren’t even doing what they should have been doing at that moment, which was either catching up on their ever-present backlog of work or getting some sleep as the clock rapidly approached midnight.

They were, in fact, in the middle of painstakingly redecorating a house in the Sims when they felt a slight pinch around their wrist.

They swatted the source of the pinch before looking to see what it was they had attacked. They had assumed it was a mosquito, as those always seemed to find a way into their apartment though they never left the windows open, but when they looked at their arm they instead found the remains of a black spider.

Their first thought was feeling bad for the spider that they had unthinkingly killed.

Their second thought was that they had probably just made the mosquito problem worse instead of better. Good going there, Adrian.

Their third thought was that oh shit, they’d just been  _bitten by a spider_ , and they didn’t know much about spider bites but they knew that they sure as hell weren’t a good thing, and oh God what was going to happen to them were they going to die-

After about half an hour of Googling several variations of “spider bite symptoms”, Adrian felt a queasiness that might have been from the spider bite but was probably just their anxiety and hypochondria manifesting physically, and they gave up, shut down their computer, and went to sleep.

When they woke up, thoughts about the spider bite jumbled together with thoughts about everything else they had going on as they sat in bed, groaning as they opened their eyes and sat up.

The queasiness from the night before was gone, but Adrian could tell that something else was awry.

After a few moments of thought, they realized that the problem was that things were Too Loud.

After a few more moments of thought, they realized that what was Too Loud was their own thoughts.

But that didn’t make sense. They knew the feeling of things being Too Loud well enough, but usually it would happen at the end of the day rather than the beginning, after a long day dealing with people, with the city, with life itself and the many noises that came with it. And never before had their own thoughts been the problem. How could mere thoughts be loud in the first place, anyway?

After trying to think through the conundrum for a minute or two and only succeeding in giving themself a headache, Adrian sighed, got out of bed, and headed into the shower. Maybe a nice shower would help them clear their head... and even if it didn’t, they’d be clean at the end of it, which was more than they could say about their present state.

(They weren’t sure exactly how many days in a row they had worn the same shirt without washing it, but the answer was definitely more than one.)

The shower went well enough. Their thoughts were still Loud, when they had them, but for the most part they were able to just zone out and enjoy the warm water as they hummed the chorus of a song they’d had stuck in their head for at least three days now.

Adrian got out of the shower, grabbed a towel, dried off, glanced in the mirror-

Let out a little yelp, though they’d never admit it-

Stared at the mirror.

They looked all around their bathroom to try to find the source of the strange image in the reflection, but found nothing out of the ordinary. Though, really, given the position of the thing in the mirror, it would have to be standing in front of them, in which case they’d see it clearly enough, or...

Or standing in their place.

Adrian winked, and the thing in the mirror winked back.

Adrian looked down at themself, and that’s when it clicked.

There was no thing in the mirror.

That was just their reflection.

Their appearance wasn’t  _entirely_  changed, either. As they examined themself in the mirror, they noticed that they still has the same too-big nose, the same crooked ears, the same gap in their smile.

But their skin was black now, literally  _black_ , #000000, and their skin glistened slightly, iridescence visible even in the dim lighting of their bathroom. And their hair, always so coarse and wiry- they ran one hand through it as they observed it in the mirror- was straight and smooth as spider’s silk.

Adrian stumbled over to their computer, saw the remains of the spider that had bitten them last night. Their hand matched the spider’s body now, matched so closely that when they touched the spider’s remains it was hard to tell where Adrian stopped and the spider began.

Adrian had done enough research on spider bites the night before to know that what had happened to them didn’t even remotely resemble the symptoms of an ordinary spider bite.

This was something different. Something... stranger.


	2. Adaptation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adrian learns about their new powers.

 

Adrian stared at Google for a long minute, fully aware that Googling “what to do when your body changes color overnight” or something along those lines was highly unlikely to yield any information actually relevant to their current situation, but tempted to try it nonetheless because hell, it couldn’t hurt, right?

What got them to look away from their computer wasn’t the probable futility of their actions, but their sudden awareness of how hot their computer was running and how loudly it was whirring, despite them not having  _that_  many tabs open, really, they’d had way more tabs open when browsing Wikipedia before without any problems...

Their initial thought that something was wrong with their computer was dashed when they become suddenly, intensely aware of the sensation of the cold tile floor pressing against their feet, of the minuscule crack that was just beginning to form in one of the tiles... and the clock in the kitchen ticking, which they’d definitely never been able to hear this clearly from the other room... and their neighbors two doors down bickering, which wasn’t unusual in and of itself from what little Adrian knew of them, but they had never gotten so loud that Adrian could make out every word of their conversation clearly before... and the scent of someone a few floors away baking some delicious-smelling sugar cookies...

They put together the pieces easily enough. This wasn’t just a physical transformation, like they had initially thought.

They had super-powers.

More specifically, they had super-senses.

Adrian started to laugh, and immediately regretted it because the laughter was Loud and they could hear it echo through their apartment and feel the vibration pass through their body and it just made everything feel that much worse.

If Adrian had been asked what superpower they would want, super-senses would have been dead last on the list.

Normal senses were enough for them, really. Normal senses were more than enough, sometimes. They really didn’t want to learn first-hand what it was like to have all those senses dialed up to eleven at all times.

But obviously, the universe had had other plans.

Knowing now that they had superpowers, though, Adrian came up with an idea.

They looked down at their hands, then closed their eyes and thought really hard about what they had looked like before the spider bite- not just the color of their skin, but that tiny birthmark on their pinky finger, that long dark scar near their wrist...

They opened their eyes and saw that their hands were still black and strangely shiny. As was the rest of them.

They muttered a swear under their breath as quietly as they could, though it still felt too loud to them.

Well then. Shapeshifting was off the table, apparently.

Of course it was. That would make life too easy.

Adrian took a deep breath and re-assessed their situation.

They couldn’t go outside looking like this. That would just lead to questions, questions Adrian either wouldn’t or couldn’t answer.

Which meant that they would have to make do living in their apartment forever, or at least for the foreseeable future.

But they could make that work.

(It’s not as if they had much of a choice in the matter.)

Their work was all done online anyway, and most clients never even heard their voice, let alone had a face-to-face conversation with them.

They had already made it so that a lot of their bills were paid automatically and that a lot of their needs were fulfilled by purchases that came right to their door, out of a desire for convenience, or perhaps laziness.

It had, in fact, been the better part of a week since they had left their apartment.

They could keep that streak going.

(They would have to keep that streak going.)

And so Adrian sat down with their computer and their phone both in arm’s reach and set out to make sure that they could get everything they’d ever need delivered right to their door, while trying not to freak out too much in the process.

It worked. Well, mostly. The setting up deliveries part of the plan worked just fine. The not freaking out part... less so.

 

Adrian had successfully ensured that their transformation wouldn’t mean that they were going to starve to death.

Well, probably. Part of them wondered if their transformation would affect their eating in some way. They were already a finicky eater; they didn’t much like the prospect of having to switch to a diet of blood or raw meat or insects or something. The idea had presented itself while they were in the middle of ordering a batch of groceries, and the more they thought about it the more plausible it became, and the more plausible it became the more they kept thinking about it...

Clearly, they needed a distraction.

Luckily, they had just discovered that they had superpowers of some sort, and figuring out whether there was more to all of it than just super-senses sounded like a pretty good distraction to them.

Adrian’s first thought went to super-strength, how people always said that bugs could lift some absurd amount of weight compared to their own body weight. But they didn’t want to risk lifting something too heavy, like their bed or their fridge. If they didn’t have super-strength, they could strain a muscle that way; if they  _did_  have super-strength, they could drop the heavy object they were holding on their foot. Either way, going to a doctor or the hospital for injuries like that was out of the question, and not just because they had what might be the world’s crappiest health insurance plan.

So instead of testing their strength on something truly heavy, they settled for lifting their microwave.

The microwave felt light. Weirdly light, really, like they were barely holding anything. But then, they didn’t really have a baseline for how picking up their microwave should feel. They weren’t exactly in the habit of picking up their microwave on a regular basis. Maybe their microwave was just that light.

So, it was a definite maybe on the super-strength front.

Their next thought went to telekinesis, which, okay, they couldn’t really think of any spider connection there, but it was a really cool superpower, and hey, it was worth a shot, wasn’t it?

Their chosen target was a bag of chips that stood on the counter on the far side of the kitchen.

(They had never eaten a proper dinner the night before, and while chips weren’t exactly an ideal breakfast, it would be better than nothing.)

What Adrian had hoped would happen was that, by staring at the bag of chips and thinking really hard about it, they would just magically appear in their hands. Or maybe it would be more of a process, the bag of chips floating over to them as they focused on it, its movement slow but steady.

What actually happened was that some sort of white webbing shot out from their wrist and latched onto the bag of chips before retracting, and the bag of chips hit them squarely in the forehead before landing at their side.

The good news was that the bag of chips had successfully made its way over to them.

The bad news was that it was entirely covered in sticky webbing, making actual retrieval of the chips nigh impossible.

They tried using a knife- not one of their good knives, because they knew they were playing with fire here, but just a random metal knife from their silverware drawer- to cut through the webbing and get to the chips. The knife instead became lodged in the webbing, embedded just far enough to puncture the chip bag, which quickly deflated.

So all in all, Operation: Get Chips To Eat, while enlightening, couldn’t really be called a success.

They did find upon further testing, however, that they could get their hand to stick to the ceiling if they focused on it. Getting unstuck to the ceiling... wasn’t as easy. It took them almost half an hour to get back on the ground, and while hanging on the ceiling by one hand was marginally more entertaining than it sounds, it still wasn’t an experiment they particularly wished to repeat.

Even more experimentation revealed that if they aimed just right, they could make a web latch onto their doorframe and let them swing from their kitchen into their bedroom and back again, momentum carrying them from room to room several times over before leaving them spinning below the doorframe. It made them a bit dizzy, admittedly, but it was also strangely exhilarating.

 

Adrian tried to use a few other possible superpowers with no success before embarking on a test for super-speed. They didn’t know how fast they could run normally, admittedly, and they didn’t have any good way of quantifying their running speed, but they figured if they just kept running around their apartment they’d figure out whether they had super-speed one way or another.

Which sounded like a great plan, until they mistimed their running and realized that they were about to faceplant against a wall, with no chance that they could slow down in time to avoid a collision.

Adrian closed their eyes and braced for impact.

It took them a few seconds to realize that there wasn’t going to be an impact.

Their first thought was that some combination of super-strength and invulnerability had led them to burst through the wall without even feeling it, and that they were very, very lucky that this wall didn’t face the building’s exterior.

Then, after a moment of thought, they realized that the wall in question  _did_  in fact face outside.

Adrian gulped and opened their eyes to find that the room was upside-down.

No, strike that. The room was normal.  _They_  were upside-down, hanging off the ceiling like gravity didn’t apply to them, except that their hair was dangling up- no,  _down_  towards the floor of their apartment.

A few tentative steps revealed that they could walk on the ceiling, that as long as they had one foot firmly planted on the ceiling gravity continued to pass them by.

Then, not knowing what would happen but eager to find out, they jumped.

Gravity instantly righted itself, making them collapse onto the floor beneath them.

The good news was, after they finished tending to their various aches and pains that the fall had inflicted upon them, they were pretty sure that super-healing was  _also_  one of their newfound superpowers.


	3. Tragic Backstory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Exactly what it says on the tin. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes a detailed account of a fictional mass shooting incident. If that may be a problem for you, I would recommend that you skip this chapter.

Adrian didn’t have too many options when it came to sharing information about their newfound superpowers with people.

They had lost track of all their friends from high school and college, which Adrian liked to think was for a number of complicated reasons, but really, in the end, it all boiled down to them not putting in the effort to maintain those relationships, and one by one their old friends stopped reaching out to them in turn.

They had some friends on the Internet, which was great- really, it was great, they were  _great_ \- but they were hesitant to talk about something so big with those friends, unsure how much their Internet friends could help from states or countries or continents away, worried that one way or another anything they said on the Internet would get shared and traced back to them.

Their extended family had basically turned their backs on them entirely the moment they came out as agender, which, honestly, fuck them. If they couldn’t accept Adrian for who they really were, then who gave a shit about them, really?

(Adrian tried not to think about how they had been so close to a number of those same relatives during their childhood and adolescence, about exactly how many budding familial relationships had been completely and utterly destroyed by one uncomfortable truth.)

Adrian was an only child, so there were no siblings for them to reach out to or lean on in this time of need.

And their mother wasn’t around anymore. She had died in a car accident when Adrian was fourteen. It wasn’t pretty. (Even after years of therapy, Adrian still had never been able to bring themself to get behind the wheel. Which, they supposed, was now suddenly a non-issue. One small upside there.)

Which left... their father.

Their father, who Adrian’s phone showed was calling them now, a little over a week after their unexpected overnight transformation.

Adrian hesitated for a moment before taking the phone call.

“Adrian?”

Adrian let out a soft laugh, and then wondered as their laughter faded if their voice had always sounded so high-pitched and childish.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“I just thought I’d check up on you. It’s been a while, you know.” Adrian’s father didn’t say that he wished Adrian had thought to call him rather than vice versa. Adrian’s father didn’t have to say it; Adrian knew just the same.

“I know, I’m sorry, I’ve just been caught up with work.” Not a lie, exactly. They weren’t good with lies, and they certainly knew better than to try lying to their father, who might as well have been a living lie detector. But they  _had_  been caught up with work, had buried themself in projects so they had something on their mind besides the whole superpower transformation weirdness, and thus minutes had turned to days with them barely noticing.

“My dear child, always the busy little worker bee.”

Adrian couldn’t quite tell if that was sarcasm on their father’s part.

“I’ve been busy too, actually,” he continued. “I’ve been working a big case the last few weeks, but it finally wrapped up today.”

“Uh, that’s good, I guess.”

Adrian knew what their father was going to request before the words could leave his lips.

“Hey, Adrian, can we meet up after I finish work tonight?”

Knowing in advance didn’t make the blow any softer.

Because Adrian wanted to meet their father, they really did, but...

But going out like this wasn’t an option.

And meeting their father like this  _definitely_  wasn’t an option.

“Uh, I don’t know...”

“Come on, it’ll be fun! We can go to that cafe you like so much, the one with the chocolate croissants, I always forget the name-”

“Cafe Amito.” Adrian answered reflexively.

“That’s the one! I’ll swing by around six, get two croissants- one for me, one for you- and you can drop by when you finish up with your work, how about it?”

“Uh.” The silence hung in the air uncomfortably, almost tangibly. “I’m not sure if I can-”

That was a lie, of course. They  _were_  sure. Sure that they couldn’t meet up, as much as they wished they could.

“Sure you can! Aren’t you always saying how flexible your work schedule is? Can’t you make a little room in it for your dear old dad?”

Adrian’s insides tensed up. “It’s not that, it’s just, uh, well, it’s complicated- wait, aren’t you supposed to be cutting back on your sugar?”

Their father laughed a little. “You’re right, I am. I guess you’d better get there before I eat your croissant, too, then.”

“Wait, Dad, I-”

“See you there!”

_Click._

Adrian let out a long sigh as they stared at their phone, the call over, hoping that their relationship with their father wasn’t over along with it.

As they sat there and stared, however, they began to form an idea.

They couldn’t actually meet their father at the cafe, but maybe, if they did everything just right, they would get the chance to see him all the same.

Adrian pulled together an outfit made entirely of black clothing, including that ski mask they’d bought on a whim months ago and never actually wore, even in the depths of winter. Their skin blended in with their clothing, making their appearance look significantly less, well, freakish. Good. Between the black clothing and the evening sky growing darker and darker, maybe nobody would give them a second look.

Next, they opened one of their windows.

And looked down.

And gulped.

Part of them suspected that this wasn’t actually that good of a plan after all; part of them was determined to follow through with it nonetheless.

And sure, their spider webbing had held out firmly enough when they were swinging from room to room earlier.

But it was one thing to jump into the air and swing from the top of a doorframe, and it was an entirely different thing to jump from their fourth-story apartment and hope that they would manage to swing to safety before hitting the ground.

They thought about what a bad idea this whole plan was.

They wondered if they could stick to the side of their apartment building like they had stuck to their ceiling before, if that might be a way to save themself if their webbing failed them.

They were pretty sure that even if that didn’t pan out, either, falling four stories wouldn’t kill them. Probably. And hey, they had super-healing, right? What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all that?

They closed their eyes and let out a long breath before jumping.

They looked at the closest building that wasn’t their own and focused really, really hard on getting their spider webbing to shoot out towards it.

And so it did.

Their heart raced as they spun web after web and flew from skyscraper to skyscraper, moving fast enough that they never came too close to hitting the ground. Their arms were shaking. Their adrenaline was racing. Their legs felt a little weak and their stomach was a bit queasy and they were sweating bullets- wearing all black in the dead of summer, while necessary under the circumstances, wasn’t exactly the best choice when it came to beating the heat- but they felt strangely alive in a way they couldn’t remember feeling before.

Luckily, Cafe Amito was a straight shot from their apartment building, only a few short blocks away. (The part of Adrian that hadn’t completely freaked out by this point was quietly glad that they wouldn’t have to figure out how to navigate turns; web-slinging from building to building was hard enough as it was.) Adrian started directing their webs further and further up as they approached the cafe before climbing onto an adjacent rooftop and staring down at the cafe below.

They couldn’t really see that much from all the way up there. Adrian considered testing their theory about clinging to the sides of buildings as a way to get closer to the cafe, but even though they were pretty sure by now that they could web themself to safety if they failed, a person standing on the side of a building without falling seemed like the sort of thing that might get people’s attention, and the last thing they wanted to do right now was draw attention to their presence.

But even though they couldn’t see too many details from the top of the nearest building, they could still tell that, a few minutes before six, their father dutifully sat himself down at one of Cafe Amito’s outside tables. He was wearing that one brown striped suit that he’d owned ever since Adrian could remember, one that Adrian sometimes gently teased him about, saying how old it was or how it didn’t flatter him.

Adrian couldn’t tell from this high up if the plate their father had put on the table held croissants, let alone whether there were one or two sitting there.

For a brief moment, Adrian thought of how some scientists would say that their world was just one of a great number of universes in existence. Adrian wondered if, in one of those other universes, they were sitting down there right now, teasing their father about that old striped suit in between bites of chocolate croissant.

They stood there for a few long minutes, watching their father sit outside waiting in vain for their arrival, but soon enough, they decided to turn back and head home. Watching their father from afar wasn’t really accomplishing anything; all it did was make them miss him all the more, made them feel that much further from him, the distance between them vast and overwhelming even though he was just a building over and a few dozen stories beneath their feet.

After they got home, they took a moment to catch their breath, took off most of their too-hot clothes (that ski mask was positively filthy now, and practically dripping with sweat, sticky to the touch as they pulled it off of their face), and sat back down next to their computer and went back to work as if nothing had happened. In a way, perhaps nothing  _had_  happened, really.

But then one of their Internet friends pulled their attention away from their work.

_Adrian, are you okay?_

Adrian stared at the words on the screen, blinking a few times, as if that would answer the half-formed questions in their head for them.

_Yeah, I’m okay._

After a moment’s consideration, Adrian sent another message.

_Why? Did something happen?_

Their friend responded almost immediately.

_You didn’t hear?_

Adrian’s hands were shaking as they typed their response, but this time, it wasn’t because of an adrenaline rush.

_I guess not. Hear what?_

The seconds seemed to go by so slowly, time trickling by as their friend typed up their response.

_Someone shot up a cafe in New York. A couple people died, a few more are in the hospital now... I’m glad to hear that you’re safe and sound, at least._

Oh.

Oh  _shit_.

It didn’t take them long to connect the dots, even though the logical part of them was screaming that there had to be thousands of cafes in New York, that the odds of the one in question being Cafe Amito were slim to none, that they were jumping to conclusions as recklessly as they had jumped from their apartment building not too long ago...

But it seemed that today, at least, luck wasn’t on their side.

One glance at Twitter revealed that #CafeAmito was trending. (As was #NewYorkStrong, and #ThoughtsAndPrayers, and half a dozen other hashtags related to the shooting besides.)

Adrian looked to the news articles and scanned them for references to the victims, hoping against hope that they wouldn’t see their father’s name among them, that he had left before the bloodshed started, that this tragedy would be just another senseless shooting that happened to take place in their hometown, rather than... than...

The victims included Savannah Connor, the gap-toothed blonde second-grader who loved math and unicorns and the color yellow and would never grow up to be a doctor as she had dreamed of doing. And Mr. and Mrs. Park, newlyweds on their honeymoon, exploring New York City together for the first time; Mr. Park was killed in the shooting, while Mrs. Park was still fighting for her life from a hospital bed. And Daniel “Danny” Riley, his middle school’s star quarterback, who survived the shooting, but was told by doctors that he would never walk again. And Jackson Hunt, a bright young man who survived a childhood bout with leukemia and was headed to MIT in the fall for a degree in Computer Science, who had been injured by the first bullet that hit him and killed by the second.

And Anthony “Tony” Ragno, a local attorney and widower, who had been pronounced dead on arrival at the nearest hospital, and whose adult child, not present at the shooting, could not be reached for comment.

Tony was one of the first to be shot and killed on the scene, Adrian read on as they fought off tears. The gunman had pointed his gun at Savannah Connor, and Tony Ragno had gotten up from his seat and tried to wrestle the gun away from the shooter before little Savannah could get hurt.

It had almost worked, too.

Almost.

(None of the news articles made any mention of whether Tony Ragno had been eating a chocolate croissant at the time.)

As they read article after article, they learned not only about the victims of the Cafe Amito shooting but about its instigator. Some part of Adrian knew, from the moment that they read the shooter’s name, that they would never be able to forget it for as long as they lived. They saw pictures of him smiling at his college graduation, saw a less-flattering mugshot from when he had been taken into custody a few months prior for a domestic violence charge that never got prosecuted. They learned that he had lost his job two weeks beforehand, and that he had been living with his girlfriend, who he had shot and killed in their shared apartment before heading to Cafe Amito. Nobody had a good answer for why he had chosen Cafe Amito as the site of so much violence, and it seemed likely that nobody would ever know the truth, as the gunman had shot himself in the head as the police were closing in on him, choosing death over a probable lifetime of imprisonment.

Adrian turned their phone on silent and let it ring and ring and ring, let the missed calls pile up and their voicemail inbox fill without giving it so much as a second glance. They checked their Facebook early the next morning and decided to delete their account altogether rather than dealing with the outpouring of messages directed their way.

Adrian couldn’t go to their father’s funeral, much as they wanted to be there, much as they wanted to get the kind of closure that that might bring. But their relatives (who had consistently misgendered and deadnamed them in interviews with the press, to the point where half the news outlets were referring to them by their deadname, even though they had been officially named Adrian for over four years now, thank you very much) already thought they were a freak, and they weren’t going to show up with pitch-black skin and prove them right.

They sent flowers, though.

Actually, they sent flowers to all the victims of the Cafe Amito shooting, sent a large arrangement of spider lilies to the living and the dead alike, to funeral beds and to hospital rooms. The bouquets were all sent anonymously, with a note that read simply,  _You deserved better_.

Adrian knew, logically, that the shooting wasn’t really their fault, that this blood wasn’t on their hands. But they also knew that they had superpowers, that they had been near Cafe Amito only a few short minutes before the shooting began, and some part of them couldn’t help but wonder if maybe, if they had stuck around, if they had joined their father at the cafe after all... maybe they could have prevented it.

But they would never really know for sure, they supposed.

That wasn’t the universe they were living in. That wasn’t the way things had played out. Anything else was nothing more than baseless speculation.

That’s what they tried to tell themself, anyway.

 

Cafe Amito hadn’t accepted orders for delivery before the shooting, but a lot had changed since then, and when they were facing bankruptcy and received a sizable anonymous donation requesting that they do deliveries, well, the cafe’s owner wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The majority of orders were still placed by people wanting to eat in or around the cafe itself, but they gained a fair amount of delivery customers as well once the option was available. Most were one-off orders, but soon enough they developed a handful of regular customers who, for one reason or another, preferred to have the cafe’s food delivered to them.

One of those regulars lived in a fourth-floor apartment only a few blocks down the street from Cafe Amito, who once a month, like clockwork, would place an order for two chocolate croissants, to be delivered right to their door.


End file.
